


Jane Eyre IN SPACE

by orphan_account



Category: Jane Eyre - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/M, Prompt Fill, Space Colonization AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:50:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1454323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The scene from the original novel where Jane discovers that Mr. Rochester didn't die in the fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jane Eyre IN SPACE

**Author's Note:**

> I had a cooler-than-average eighth grade English teacher, so this is from when I was thirteen. Ages and ages ago. She had us write fanfictions (shhh, they're actually called Alternative Book Reports). The prompt was "Take a scene from your reading book and write it with a different setting." (also known as: rewrite a scene from the canon into an AU.) So of course I put Jane Eyre in space. This was the logical thing to do. Obviously. So this one's for you, Ms. Pedro. (Except she's already read it. I got an A, if anyone was wondering.)  
> I had to dig this out of my old computer, since it's ages old. Trying to get the mouse to move on that machine was the hardest part of the production of this work. As such, this is a very old work, and is being posted here mostly for posterity. I'm aware that the style isn't the best I can do. Nonetheless, here's what I wrote of the Jane Eyre space-age AU.

INTRODUCTION  
 _Jane Eyre never knew her parents, nor what planet she came from. She was orphaned as a baby and taken into the custody of her resentful relatives, who mistreated her. Her relatives raised her in their small ship in orbit around a distant planet. At the age of ten, Jane was taken to Space Station 10w00d, where she was educated with many other girls her age in the essential arts of programming, space flight, battle, and other such skills that every proper young lady must know. Life on SS 10w00d, however, was difficult. The space food was poor quality and freezer burnt, the girls were given barely the minimum of necessities to survive, and Jane was resented by the headmaster. After many girls died of asphyxiation from a leaking airlock, Space Station 10w00d underwent an investigation and was reformed the Galactic School Board. Jane was trained at 10w00d until the age of nineteen, when she went out into the universe to look for a job. She found one at the Space Station TH0rnf131d in orbit around a planet from the Alpha Centauri system, where she began the programming of a small droid that the captain, Mr. Rochester, had acquired during his travels. The captain, however, did not stay at the station much; he was out of galaxy when Jane arrived. Meanwhile, Jane was not content with peaceful calmness. She longed for something more- but then strange noises began coming from the upper airlock during night shift on the dark side of the planet. While these beeps and whines persisted, often accompanied by a mechanical laughter and flickering lights on the ship, Jane began to suspect an outdated, otherwise insignificant maintenance droid was causing the strange noises. Meanwhile, Mr. Rochester returned to TH0rnf13ld. Jane quickly became attracted to the mysterious man. However, the captain seemed attracted to another woman: an alien from a small planet orbiting Betelgeuse. The alien woman seemed in every way a superior life form to whatever species Jane was, and she gradually lost all hope of Mr. Rochester ever liking her. One day, however, the captain admitted to Jane that he loved her, and the woman from Betelgeuse was simply a plot to make Jane want him even more. Rochester asked for her hand in marriage and Jane obliged. The wedding day came, and all was going smoothly until one of Mr. Rochester’s co-workers, a brilliant scientist, announced that the captain could not marry because he was in possession of a dangerous hazard that was illegal by Galactic law. Jane soon discovered that the hazard was Droid mr5. R0ch35t3r, a rogue cyborg that had gone haywire in one of Rochester’s experiments that had gone badly wrong. The robot, after turning rogue, had been confined in the upper airlock and remained there since. It had been put into the custody of the outdated maintenance droid, and it was impossible to destroy without blowing the entire ship to smithereens. For having custody of this robot, Mr. Rochester was forbidden to marry any woman in his spacecraft, for it would be a potentially fatal danger until the rogue cyborg was removed. Of course, nobody would take a rogue cyborg, and it was, while malfunctioning, completely capable of functioning in the vacuum of space, where it could wreak unimaginable havoc. Heartbroken but determined, Jane resolved to leave Space Station TH0rnf13ld forever. She took a small ship to the Andromeda Galaxy, where she attempted to find work. However, no planet would take her, and she was dying of asphyxiation on a methane-based planet when she accidentally slipped into a wormhole. Jane was saved, but transported into an alternate dimension. In this dimension, Jane was part of a family with three loving cousins, and her parents were still alive. She set up a small programming facility, and all was running swimmingly until her cousin, who was a missionary, insisted on marrying her. His plan was that they would marry and travel on mission trips to teach developing planets to bang stones together and make fire, but Jane flatly refused. She knew that she would not be happy with him banging rocks, but he insisted. Jane, frightened, left the alternate dimension and her long-lost family through a rift in the space-time continuum to look for Captain Rochester. Now she approaches TH0rnf13ld, not knowing what she may find…_

I gripped the controls of the small fighter ship tightly, as the planet’s twin suns rose into view, a spark of light spreading a fire of golden streaks across my vision and throwing Space Station TH0rnf13ld into a sharp silhouette, a black shape floating majestically in orbit around the planet, its many extensions, ports, and spacecraft docks as familiar to me as the back of my hand. My hand trembled on the controls; I hesitated. What should I do? Should I dock in a port and walk in? No; it was never this simple. Would I just hide here in this ship forever? No, I must go into the space station and present myself- but how? Now that the task of seeing Mr. Rochester was at hand, it seemed so impossible. I thought of turning back- but the rift in the space-time continuum had long closed; the gash in reality had been sewn up, and besides, I could not contend myself with a life of banging rocks with my cousin.  
Then I saw it- TH0rnf13ld’s exterior was flooded with light, and every detail was illuminated in ghastly horror. I gasped as the truth came over me: this was not TH0rnf13ld as I knew it, but a mere skeleton. Charred ashes and rubble crumbled off of it, forming a dust cloud of rings held together by the space station’s gravity field. I gasped, and clutched the controls. What had happened? I checked the control panel: the blackened frame of the place I had once hoped to call home gave off no heat: if there had been any sort of electrical fire, it had been put out for some time now.  
Where was everyone? Where were the cleaning droids, the cooking droids, the serving droids? Where was Rochester? All those years in the parallel universe, and I had barely dared myself to think- but he couldn’t be- but the evidence was right in front of me, mere miles from my eyes.  
Was Mr. Rochester dead?

I pulled out of the gravity field, and, with a shuddering jolt, the fighter ship wheeled around and zoomed off with a burst of speed, jetting away.  
A few hours I docked in at an ISS (Intergalactic Space Station) on the fringes of the star system. It was an uninhabited sector of this spiral arm, and therefore it had sprung up with high-level space station developments. Of course, not many could afford the luxury and peace of uninhabited planets to orbit (most life forms had to frequently update their ion shields to protect from incoming missiles launched by angry native planet-dwellers) but if you led a secluded life like Mr. Rochester did- had? - then it was essential, and serendipitous that he should inherit the orbit and space station TH0rnf13ld from relatives.  
I scanned my card and the droid beeped information at me. Walking over to the gravity portals, I scanned my card, stepped into the small, cramped portal; I stepped out of the portal and stood, stooped over, in the pod room. It was identical to the other ten thousand facilities in the space station: about fifteen feet in length and slightly elliptical, it had a simple bunk for sleeping and a small compartment in which to store belongings. A small touch panel sat on one end of the room, and I noticed a green light blinking. I tapped it, scanned the information on the screen, and tapped it again. I heard a small mechanical buzzing sound, which grew in a steady crescendo into the sound of a service elevator. A droid rolled out. I glanced at it for a moment; it seemed familiar, and I realized it was the same model as the service droids at TH0rnf13ld. “Are you… are you from TH0rnf13ld?”  
The robot’s voice struck a chord in me; the syn waves of the pitches of the robot’s automated voice painfully reminded me of the space station, or what remained of it. “Affirmative. I have been transferred from the Space Station TH0rnf13ld, where I maintained Captain Rochester, now deceased.”  
A hard lump formed in my throat. “De- deceased? Mr. Rochester? Is he dead?”  
“I mean the present gentleman, Mr. Edward’s father.”  
“So Captain Rochester is still alive?”  
“Affirmative.”  
I let out a pent-up sigh of relief. He was alive!  
The maintenance droid went on to explain: The rogue droid in the airlock gone on a rampage. The cleaning droid, with a run-down battery, had gone into standby mode while guarding it, and the borg was free to escape. It first set fire to the airlock. The theory is that it had somehow found out about the wedding, and was furious. It, on its rampage, had set electrical fires to my own sleeping chamber- I had departed it, of course. The droid mentioned how Mr. Rochester had searched for me; of course he wouldn’t have found me. The wormhole had closed after I had gone through, and it was only by pure chance that I had been able to escape the alternate dimension again. Mr. Rochester, it seemed, had gone out of his way to salvage every droid and human on his ship. During the chaos, he lost his sight and part of his arm. He would forever be blind. Meanwhile, the rogue droid had gone into self-destruct mode. It was forever gone: many of its circuits had been damaged in the fire and it would never again make those strange noises in the upper airlock that had kept me awake so many nights. No fatalities were reported, but TH0rnf13ld was beyond repair. Perhaps one day the gravitational pull of the planet would bring it crashing down, leaving a crater on the hard continents, a pile of rubble.  
“So where can I find Rochester?” I asked when the droid was finished.  
It gave me the location of the space station where he had fled: it was in a neighboring star system. Inside the pod room, I shifted my weight from one foot to another; it was taxing to stand here when somewhere, Mr. Rochester was alive.  
The next morning, I began my journey. He was somewhere out there, among the stars, waiting for me.  
I was going to find him.


End file.
